SCOPE

Games are structured contexts where players have clear objectives, with victory as end goal. In a game, players must overcome challenges and face opponents (real or game characters) but always respecting a clearly-defined set of rules. Failure to follow these rules implies a punishment or penalty. Games can involve one player acting alone, two or more players acting cooperatively, or players or teams of players competing between themselves. Games can offer an incredibly immersive and engaging environment where users ‘learn by doing’ and from their own mistakes in a controlled environment that is able also to improve teamwork, social skills, leadership and collaboration.

Serious Games focus on the design, development, use and application of games for purposes other than entertainment. Education and training represent the main areas of application of Serious Games but they have been used, with success, for health, research, emergency planning, advertisement and military purposes. The most striking effect in the use of Serious Games is an increased motivation and engagement. As such, Serious Games require specific design, recreating real scenarios through interactive and/or immersive environments.

However, in spite of the existing evidence of success, there is still a limited use of Serious Games. This has mainly to do with social concerns and stereotypes about the relation of games and serious purposes. Other issues relate to physical and cost barriers, hardware and license cost, access (for online games), maintenance and support. But this limited use is also related to the lack of extended evidence of effective application.

The International Conference on Serious Games, Interaction and Simulation is a multidisciplinary approach to the presentation of research, theory, application, practice and validation in the field of Serious Games for any level and any area. As such it will cover areas like cognition, psychology, technology-enhanced education, evaluation and assessment, multimedia and information technology. SGames 2015 is interested in new scientific approaches and results from experiments and real-life applications.

HIGHLIGHTS

The event is endorsed by the European Alliance for Innovation, a leading community-based organisation devoted to the advancement of innovation in the field of ICT.

All accepted papers will be published by Springer and made available through SpringerLink Digital Library, one of the world's largest scientific libraries.